Time Is A River
by infiniteviking
Summary: On time, space, serendipity, and the importance of a good pair of shoes.


**Time Is A River**

Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is a jar. -Waldo Butters, _Dead Beat  
_

She saw his first incarnation in, fittingly, a library, and ducked behind the stacks to wait until he'd gone.

The second she brushed past in a crowded street, and was left with a fleeting impression of tousled hair and a startlingly keen focus that, thankfully, hadn't been trained on her. (Following him to his destination, which apparently included wading in an embassy fountain with a flock of pigeons until some dignitary or other agreed to talk to him, she wondered if she'd been mistaken, and nicked his shoes. He knocked at her door the next day, and she left the shoes in the middle of the room, fled out the window, and couldn't stop laughing for months.)

She didn't get to see the third at all. She only heard him - a clipped, gruff voice over the emergency channel ordering everyone to _not_ shoot at the monsters, as they were immune to bullets. Predictably, nobody complied, but she hunkered down and watched in her mind as havoc and treachery blew the negotiations all to flinders, wishing she could have heard him narrate something other than a war.

His fourth self seemed to be everywhere, all easy grins and languid oddities; it was a job of work just staying out of his way. At that, several of his companions managed to catch her by surprise: she wondered if he'd been telling them to keep an eye out (and was disappointed later to discover he hadn't). One of them was like him, and for the first time she felt almost out of her depth, but when the time came that she needed to learn how a TARDIS worked, she knew exactly who to call.

When his sandy-haired fifth self showed up on the site of a meteor strike in Alaska, she hurriedly came down with a very bad flu and squirreled herself away in the sick tent until he'd gone. She realized afterwards that this had been a mistake - he was, after all, a doctor. Fortunately the alien larvae had occupied his time, but she catalogued the mistake for later reference.

His sixth iteration barged into a delicate diplomatic negotiation, insulted all the parties, nicked _her_ shoes (to build a temporal subharmonic resonator with), and nearly ate the Grand High Milerax before someone told him it was sentient. Fortunately the fashions of the day included veils, robes, and voice distorters (for everyone except him), but she never did get those shoes back.

She never met his seventh self either, but came home once to find a small package in her pigeonhole, wrapped in brown paper with creases as clean as cut glass. It contained a blue book with blank pages, along with a brush and a stick of Japanese ink, and a small note that read in a clear spidery hand, "_For later_." (Many things, he said afterwards, had been lost in his next transition.)

She got his eighth incarnation a table at a very wonderful restaurant on Antares Prime, borrowed the TARDIS while he was out (to deal with a crisis several solar systems distant which, thanks to her, he'd have missed), deliberately parked her the wrong way round when they got back, and nicked his shoes again. Worlds later, she pulled a blanket about his shoulders as he sat huddled on a damp stone, shivering violently and smelling of something that was still burning in another part of the universe; but his mind and memory were far away, and he never knew she'd been there.

In his ninth life, he hauled her into a darkened entryway out of sight of the Auton platoons, the night the Nestene tried to take Thalassica XIV. The tramping feet seemed to take forever to go by and his hearts pounded frantically against her shoulderblades, and then he called her a stupid ape and shoved her out in the direction of the shipyards, where the other refugees had gathered. (She ran, so as not to be recognized, but swore she'd get him back for that someday.) Also in his ninth life, he got fed up with the mystery and tried to hunt her down. It was early in her timeline, and she learned a lot about escaping.

Much, much later, he told her that his tenth self had only met her once.

She spent the rest of her life wondering when that would be.


End file.
